High Energy Physics, Particle tracking in CERN detectors

What is happening? To explore what our universe is made of, scientists at CERN are colliding protons, essentially recreating mini big bangs, and meticulously observing these collisions with intricate silicon detectors. While orchestrating the collisions and observations is already a massive scientific accomplishment, analyzing the enormous amounts of data produced from the experiments is becoming an overwhelming challenge.

Every particle leaves a track behind, like a car leaving tire marks. The particle is not caught in action. Now we want to link every track to one hit that the particle created. In every event, a large number of particles are released. They move along a path leaving behind their tracks. They eventually hit a particle detector "surface". In this Notebook I am going to visualize these tracks in the best way possible and will also go through some more details.

Extract data

Event data(hits, cells, particles, truth) and detectors

The project is also uploaded on jhub. So the data can be found there too

Download the detectors.cvs file and the train_sample zip. Exctract the zip file and all should set. The notebook, the detectors file and the train_sample folder should be in the same folder

The data is already curated but just in case let's get throgh some steps to clean our data 🧹